Thunder, a Cloister and a Door in Wittenberg

I will cry unto God most high; unto God that performeth all things for me. PSALM 57:2

A miner’s son. Martin Luther was born on 10 November 1483 at Eisleben, in the county of Mansfeld in Saxony, and baptised the next day, the feast of St Martin, whose name he was given. His father, Hans, came of peasant stock and had gone into the copper mines; by hard work he rose to lease smelters of his own and to sit on the town council of Mansfeld, where the family soon moved. His mother, Margarethe, was a devout and hard-working woman. The home was strict, the schooling stricter, and the boy learned early both the fear of punishment and the fear of God. He was sent to school at Mansfeld, then at Magdeburg and Eisenach, and in 1501 to the University of Erfurt, where he took his master’s degree in 1505. His father had chosen his career: he was to study law.

The storm. He did not study it for long. On 2 July 1505, walking back to Erfurt after a visit home, he was caught in a violent thunderstorm near the village of Stotternheim. Lightning struck close beside him and threw him to the ground. In terror he cried out to St Anne, the patron of miners, vowing to become a monk. A fortnight later, against his father’s furious opposition, he entered the house of the Augustinian friars at Erfurt. He was ordained priest in 1507.

The anxious friar. He was, by every account, an exemplary monk: he prayed the hours, fasted, kept vigils and confessed with painful thoroughness. But none of it brought peace. The more he strove, the more he saw that God requires not only outward acts but a pure heart and a perfect love, and he knew he did not have them. He feared God’s righteousness as a sword. His superior and confessor, Johann von Staupitz, a gentle and wise man, pointed him to the wounds of Christ and, to occupy his troubled mind, set him to study for a doctorate. In 1510 Luther went to Rome on the business of his order and was shaken by the worldliness he saw. In 1512 he became a doctor of theology and took up the chair of Bible at the young University of Wittenberg, in Electoral Saxony, which he was to hold for the rest of his life.

The gate of paradise. There, lecturing on the Psalms, then on Romans, Galatians and Hebrews, he wrestled with Paul’s words in Romans 1:17. He had been taught to read the righteousness of God as the justice by which God punishes the unrighteous, and he confessed later that he had come to hate that word. Then, pondering the whole verse, he saw that it speaks of the righteousness by which God, in mercy, makes the sinner righteous through faith: the just shall live by faith. It was, he said long afterwards, as though he had been born again and had gone through open gates into paradise. Scholars still argue about exactly when this happened; what matters is that it happened, and that it changed everything.

Ninety-five theses. In 1517 the Dominican preacher Johann Tetzel was selling indulgences near Wittenberg, promising remission of the punishment of sins, even for the dead, to raise money for the rebuilding of St Peter’s in Rome. Luther’s own people went to buy them. On 31 October he sent ninety-five theses for debate to the Archbishop of Mainz, and by long tradition he posted them on the door of the Castle Church. Whether the nailing happened is debated; that the theses were soon printed and read across Germany is not. What began as an academic protest became a public storm.

The break. The next four years moved quickly. In 1518 he explained his theology of the cross to his own order at Heidelberg and was questioned by a papal legate at Augsburg. In 1519, debating with Johann Eck at Leipzig, he was driven to say that popes and councils could err. In 1520 he published three great treatises: an appeal To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of a Christian. That December, when a papal bull threatening excommunication reached him, he burned it publicly outside Wittenberg. The excommunication followed in January 1521.

Worms. In April 1521 he was summoned before the young Emperor Charles V and the princes of the Empire at the Diet of Worms. Shown a table of his books and ordered to recant, he asked for time, and the next day replied that unless he were convinced by Scripture and plain reason, he could not and would not recant, for his conscience was captive to the Word of God. He is remembered as ending, Here I stand, I can do no other; the words may belong to the printed tradition rather than to what was said in the hall, but they fit the man. He was declared an outlaw.

The Wartburg. On the road home he was seized by horsemen — a friendly kidnap arranged by his prince, Frederick the Wise — and hidden in the Wartburg castle above Eisenach. For ten months he lived there as Junker Jörg, Knight George, bearded and restless, often ill and often in deep inner conflict. In a matter of weeks he translated the New Testament from Greek into German. It was published in September 1522, and its vigorous, plain speech helped to shape the German language. The whole Bible followed in 1534.

Troubled years. Returning to Wittenberg in 1522 to calm disorders that had broken out in his absence, he became the leader, often reluctantly, of a movement. He preached, lectured, wrote and organised: German worship, hymns, schools, care for the poor. In 1525 came the Peasants’ War. Luther had rebuked the princes for their oppression and urged peace; when the revolt turned violent he wrote a tract calling on the rulers to strike the rebels down, and many thousands were killed. The same year he wrote The Bondage of the Will against Erasmus.

Katie. On 13 June 1525 he married Katharina von Bora, one of a group of nuns who had escaped from their convent at Easter 1523 and whom Luther had helped to find homes. It was a marriage of conviction more than romance, but it grew into deep affection. They lived in the old Augustinian house in Wittenberg, which Katharina turned into a farm, a brewery, a boarding-house for students and a home for six children, as well as orphaned relatives. Their daughter Elizabeth died as a baby, and their beloved Magdalena at thirteen, in 1542, in her father’s arms. At that table students jotted down his conversation, which became the Table Talk.

Later years. In 1529 he wrote his Small and Large Catechisms, and met Ulrich Zwingli at Marburg, where they agreed on much but parted over the Lord’s Supper. In 1530, still an outlaw, he waited in the fortress of Coburg while his colleague Philip Melanchthon led the evangelical side at the Diet of Augsburg, where the confession Melanchthon had drafted was presented to the Emperor. He lectured on Galatians and on Genesis, wrote hymns and letters of comfort, and suffered from stones, headaches and depression. His last years were darkened by bitterness, and by the writings against the Jews that remain the deepest stain on his name.

Beggars. In January 1546, ill, he travelled to Eisleben to settle a dispute between the counts of Mansfeld. He succeeded, and there, on 18 February, he died. Asked by his friend Justus Jonas whether he stood firm on Christ and the doctrine he had preached, he answered, Yes. On a slip of paper found afterwards he had written, in German and Latin, that we are beggars, and that this is true.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Luther’s road to peace ran through years of fear. If you are in such a season now, tell God so plainly, and ask Him to show you His righteousness as a gift.

2. Staupitz pointed an anxious young man to the wounds of Christ. Is there someone you could point there this week?

3. Luther stood at Worms because his conscience was captive to the Word. Name one place where your conscience is captive to something else — fear of others, comfort, habit.

4. Remember that the same life contains the Wartburg Bible and the tract against the Jews. Pray for grace to finish well.

5. Write down, as Luther did at the last, the truest sentence you know about yourself before God.

A PRAYER

Father, You found Your servant Martin in the storm and in the cloister, and You opened to him the gate of Your righteousness.

Find me where I am afraid, and show me that the righteousness You require is the righteousness You give.

Make my conscience captive to Your Word, and keep me from the bitterness that darkened even his last years.

And when my days are ended, let me die as a beggar who has been made rich in Christ. Amen.